We take our heritage more or less thanklessly as all heritage must be accepted, important only to the one who creates it. But those of us who have climbed the stairs, too, and worked over our microscopes, and turned for help and encouragement to the successors of the great Agassiz, we know that he left behind him a tradition that will last longer than his museum. For great teachers and fine research have followed Agassiz there.
The Agassiz Museum! Christened the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and never called anything but the Agassiz Museum by students, professors, or visitors. There because of Agassiz and his headlong methods which were all wrong and which got him exactly what he wanted. Frugal New Englanders said, “Lay by some of the money for the museum’s future when you are not here to support it.” Agassiz said, “Spend every cent you can get your hands on, and the future will be proud to take care of so valuable a heritage.” As it has been.
Plotted for by a diplomat of persuasion. Calls on the Governor, the Speaker of the House, the Chief Justice, anybody who had influence; clear details about the necessity of such a museum for every child from the first grade up so that he will understand creation as he understands his multiplication tables; weeks of preparatory work, and then the annual visit of the whole legislative body with the stately Governor at its head. How the students must have hung around the outskirts, and watched the ten streetcars empty their pompous load which trailed self-consciously after the eager gesticulating leader. Through all the halls, peering into laboratories where boys bent suddenly busy heads over microscopes, and into an empty lecture room where Agassiz proceeded to turn opposition into appropriation by his golden speech.
Manned by scientists of distinction, and producing students who could take their places when the time came, and who could spread their training and wisdom over the country. Filled with collections for the needs of everybody. A great museum, and one which is rightly called the Agassiz Museum. Not only for the father, but for the son, Alexander, whose quiet competence was one of the most essential elements of its development. He and Frank de Pourtalès, men not unlike in their selflessness and their discretion, often held the reins while Agassiz thought that he was driving.
Yet Agassiz knew that he was justified in trusting his staff, and he left the museum with them more and more, for the years were crowding each other harder and there was still much to be seen. He took a short voyage on the Bibb again with Pourtalès for deep-sea dredging around Florida and the Bahamas. He wrote his report, delivered a brilliant address upon the centennial of his old friend, Humboldt, and fell so ill that only a man of his vitality and determination could ever have recovered. A shock, apparently, when he could not speak, and was forbidden even to think, a nice restriction for that brain. But he had no intention of dying, and declared that he walked off his difficulties during the summer at Deerfield.
Jules Marcou complains a little sourly that it was his own fault that he didn’t live into the eighties like his mother. Simple prudence was all he needed, and willingness to keep out of the public eye. But no shawls and wheel-chairs for Louis Agassiz, and if the public chose to look at him, that was no fault of his. He had a chance to sail on another exploring voyage, and if anybody thought that he would refuse it for the sake of a few feeble useless years, he didn’t know Agassiz.
“I am going to send a new iron surveying steamer round to California in the course of the summer,” wrote the Coast Survey director. “She will probably start at the end of June. Would you go in her, and do deep-sea dredging all the way round? If so, what companions will you take? If not, who shall go?”
Who indeed? Nobody but Louis Agassiz, if he knew it! He was sixty-four years old and as excited over the prospect as if he had been twenty-four when he first longed to explore. Thomas Hill, who had been president of Harvard and who went along on the trip, tells how Agassiz sat on the edge of his berth most of the first night that they sailed, talking, talking, talking; as full of hope and plans for the success of the voyage as if his whole future hung on it. A bad night it was, too, for what with one delay and another, the ship did not get around to sailing until early in December, and it fought its way out of Boston Harbor through a snowstorm and heavy sea. Dr. Hill, who loved and appreciated Agassiz, must have wished that he would stop planning and go to bed. Perhaps Elizabeth finally dragged him off, for she went along, too, the only woman aboard except the wife of the commander.
The good ship Hassler was not a good ship at all. It had been built shoddily, and new as it was, it constantly needed repairs. Its ropes for deep-sea dredging were not long enough, its engine was defective, and it had little to recommend it. But it carried Agassiz into new worlds, and gave him fresh life through their wonders. Louis wrote that he intended “to explore the greatest depths of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on both sides of the American continent,” and perhaps it was a mercy that the ship balked into harbors of rest now and then.
Elizabeth Agassiz kept a faithful journal of the trip for a book and for Atlantic Monthly articles. Down to Santiago, where a telegram waited him from the Emperor of Brazil announcing his election to the Acadèmie des Sciences de l’Institut de France, a great honor about which Agassiz remarks: “The distinction unhappily is usually a brevet of infirmity, or at least of old age, and in my case it is to a falling house that the diploma is addressed. I regret it the more because I have never felt more disposed for work, and yet never so fatigued by it.” The shadows were lengthening, and Louis felt them, cool and dark.
But he went on with his voyage, and when honors did not come to trouble him, he found life as profitable as ever. From the small ship he could hang over the edge and pull up the sargassum which had always excited his curiosity and which he now examined in detail and declared to be torn from rocks. He found a nest, built by a fish, floating by on the broad ocean, captured and identified it, and tucked it into alcohol, carefully raising the embryos. He had the whole ship by the ears, even the sailors leaving their work to watch him and to try to hear what he was saying that so excited this odd group of people. He dredged live specimens of the fossils which he had studied so long ago, and felt as if he had caught up loose ends of science. A fossil come alive, his own country connected to this one by a lily-like crinoid which moved gently the arms that he had seen settled in a mountain’s old stone. Sponges characteristic of Jurassic days. Geology and zoology, inextricably united.
Down the South American coast, held up for repairs which gave him a chance for extra dredging; lonely islands which offered glacial evidence enough to convince anybody; back to the ship at evening, after long hard days to sit about the cabin table and discuss the finds until younger men yawned and called it a day; into the Strait of Magellan to examine the breeding places of the penguins and cormorants, and oyster banks one hundred feet high; slipping past shores so close that he could study their geology from deck; and running into a hurricane that would have put an end to the little Hassler if she had not barely made a landlocked harbor; glaciers with all the Alpine characteristics to examine; those Galapagos Islands so new in origin, so old in life, always a magnet to Agassiz; picnics on shore to which the uninvited natives came; along the Pacific coast and finally through San Francisco’s Golden Gate. A nine months’ voyage which would have taxed anybody, and which left its leader ready to go home.
He was tired, but he was satisfied. He had sailed around South America, and most of North America, as he had long intended. Things had not been too easy for him in the unpredictable little Hassler, but he still liked to pit his wits against opposition and he still enjoyed the results of his confidence. He had brought back riches for his museum, and he had small patience with this idea of resting a month in San Francisco while his imagination sorted them out and placed them on the shelves where they belonged. But if he must, he would rest thoroughly. He refused the invitations which poured in, let Elizabeth attend to social duties and to her shopping, and when October sharpened up the air and his old zest in life, bought his tickets for Cambridge an
d headed for home.
20. SMALL ISLAND OF LIFE
Louis Agassiz had an island. And a man who has an island has the earth. Mountains he had known and they were his home always. He had lived on Nahant’s rocky shore which had austere sharp beauty like the mountains, cobalt and green on clear days, black and white when it stormed. But now he had earned himself an island, and as spring came on he could hardly wait to see it.
Another of his ideas to which he had set a slow-match before he left on his Hassler trip, had fired while he was gone and was now busily burning while it waited fuel from him. For years he had wanted a summer school, and that in the days when to go to school in summer was unthinkable. Here, he reasoned, were teachers aplenty who were too healthy to need a whole summer for rest, teachers who were hungry for knowledge and did not know where to find it. They taught natural history to young people from books, and they, themselves, knew no more than was between the covers of the book. If a school, he said, could be offered them where they could live outdoors near the sources of the material they knew so little about, why couldn’t they have a good time and at the same time equip themselves as few teachers were equipped? A conviction so common nowadays that it seems it could never have been original.
While Agassiz had been away some of the younger naturalists talked over his idea and decided that if he would help, it was worth discussing. If he would help! He began on a prospectus almost as soon as he had set foot on shore. There was no site; perhaps Nantucket might do. There was no building; they would build one. There was no apparatus; they would buy it. First, foremost, and as ever, he must get money.
When the Legislature poured out of their ten horsecars on their annual March trip to the museum, they were riding for a fall. Louis showed them around as usual with perhaps a greater emphasis on the value of this museum which they had so generously supported and which was their responsibility. Then he settled them into their lecture room and began his plea. The Legislature which had its purse all open for the museum, sat up and frowned. Were they expected to support another project? Not another one at all, Louis argued cannily. An extension of this one which would enlarge its horizon over all the country, which would give every child in it a chance to benefit from the money they had already spent. All so true, and so sound, and so without ulterior motive that the Legislature listened and promised to consider.
The plea was printed in the paper that night, for newspapers were avid for any word that Agassiz might speak. The next morning John Anderson read it in New York. Once more in his life, Louis Agassiz was to feel the surge of amazement and delight when a strange magician produced out of nothing the thing which his heart desired. For John Anderson decided that here was a man who should have what he wanted and have it at once. I have an island called Penikese, he told Agassiz, and on it is a furnished house and a great barn. You may have the island, and the buildings, for your school, and I will throw in fifty thousand dollars to run it. That from a man he had never seen, and for an object that had no precedent! All within a week.
Of course Louis accepted the offer. He seemed not to hear the opposition all around him. His health, his age, the burden of expense and management, feeble objections indeed when into his hands had just fallen a final, splendid chance! He went straight ahead with his plans. And as usual when a man has an unshakable conviction, everybody fell into line behind him, and the march toward a summer school was on.
Late in April the days grew mild enough for an island visit. Mr. and Mrs. Anderson had gone ahead to arrange for the welcome. Agassiz and his guests took the train to New Bedford, and then a boat to the little island in Buzzards Bay. Little attention Louis must have had for anybody when he could at last see his island. Not like any island that he had known; low, and wind-swept with an air curiously softer than Nahant’s, sandy with beach grass and purple pea blossoms, and a clean salt smell. Agassiz strode up its beach to the house and met for the first time the man who had given him an island and everything on it.
He peered into the shadowy barn and rolled back its great doors to the sun. Nothing needed here except a new floor to make a lecture room. May and June, plenty of time for building a laboratory and dormitory, and he already saw them done. We can begin on July 8th he decided, and that allows an extra week. He sailed away from his island as a man who owns one does, with the feeling that he has the earth, complete.
On the fifth of July he came back to his island. The architect had met him in New Bedford with the information which architects seem to keep for their clients, that neither building was done. It would be absolutely impossible to open the school on the eighth. Louis fixed him with dark glowing eyes.
“The school is going to open on the eighth,” he told him, “for we can’t postpone it. Come over to the island with me.”
“But tomorrow is Sunday,” the architect objected. “We can get no more work until Monday.”
“We shall see,” said Agassiz.
Now Agassiz believed in the sacredness of the Lord’s day as he had been brought up to believe. But when he saw the unfinished buildings, his belief was even stronger in the sacredness of his promises. He called the men together; and of course they had not a chance against his persuasiveness. This is not for money nor for the making of money, he told them. It is for education alone. Shall we work or rest tomorrow?
“Work!” said the men, and work they did with Agassiz as hard at it as anybody. It was like the creation of the earth in a certain number of days. On Sunday night by dark the floors were laid; on Monday the partitions were up dividing the upper story into two long dormitories, and the lower story into laboratories; on Tuesday, and this was the promised eighth, the women took hold and finished things up. Some of the teachers had arrived early and they began their work with brooms instead of microscopes. Out went shavings, sawdust, tools; in came rows of white beds and plain furniture; the windows were thrown wide and the wind swept through, salt from the ocean underneath. Out of the barn they carried all the Anderson farming equipment, and the men rushed into it with new floor boards and nails. Someone called, “The steamer is in sight!” and they drove harder. As the last board went down, the boat eased into the wharf. But there were flowers on the lunch table, and the new lecture room, with barn swallows flying in and out of it, was ready when the school gathered in it.
Agassiz stood there, his great head bare, his deep eyes bent upon the upturned faces of these men and women who had come at his call. He must give them the wisdom and knowledge which he had gathered in the years and to which only he had the key. He could not take it with him, and it was almost time to go. This was his gift, his final one. Oh, give him strength to make it! He asked simply for silent prayer.
A moment of quiet with only the faint rush of wings overhead. Then he talked to them, and no man or woman that was not moved. For Louis Agassiz was talking out of the sense of dedication which comes to a person with such an audience. People of maturity, their vague gropings directed into purpose; people who hungered for what he had to give them; people who would know how to use it wisely and well; people who would find health and happiness through him; Louis Agassiz was the first to experience that dedication which belongs to such an audience.
A great man sometimes has to go down through the last valley, shorn of all his greatness, conscious only of the humiliation of weakness and the defections of a body still powerful enough to destroy a mind. But no such cruel cross for Louis Agassiz! It was as if that presiding genius of his had said, “Now, my man, you shall have a summer which will gather together all the loose and odd ends of your life that have puzzled people, and will weave them together into the clear pattern which I have intended. Be content, for such recognition is not often given to a man until he has been dead for more years than you have lived.” Where better than an island, complete in itself, for a rendezvous with one’s life?
Here on this low, wind- and fog-swept island the things which had made life for him seemed to foregather. Even reminders of his mountains in
the clear signs of glacial travel caught and held the old days of the Aar. The shores of the island yielded him untouched pools of the sea life which had captured him when mountains let him go, and now gave him fresh research material. Still another magician appeared and presented the school with a yacht for dredging, and his good friend Frank de Pourtalès came down and took charge of it. Old friends about him and new friends, his wife Elizabeth, a group which had no dissension among themselves or toward him. And most of all, a chance to teach the kind of inspired teaching which was one of Louis Agassiz’s great gifts. The island held all that a man could wish.
More perhaps than the island would have chosen in exchange for its solitude. The place buzzed with activity, and somehow an island seems meant for quiet. But there was little of it at Penikese that summer. Except the deep starlit nights after the busy fruitful days were over. Breakfast finished, and out of the doors streamed men and women, nearly fifty of them, over the island or down to the boat collecting in their buckets small creatures which were strange and lovely to their untrained eyes, and which no one but Professor Agassiz could tell them about. Living animals in the water where they grew; a revelation, as if book characters came to life beneath their eyes. Back to the laboratories to see what the microscopes would reveal of their catch, while around them workmen drove nails and wondered what all the excitement was about. Off to a lecture in the great barn where hammers beat a rhythm in Agassiz’s voice and built for them a second house. Lunch of plain food which filled them with amazement that food could taste so good. Then off for an afternoon on the yacht with shy and kind Pourtalès who had appreciation for the meanest treasure they could catch.
By evening the high pressure relaxed. While it still was light, after an early supper, they wandered out under the low bright sky that touched their island all around, over to a small hill where all the land and sea were spread under them. Here they waited, and soon the man they awaited came strolling along, his cigar sending up its gray feather into the clear air. With him walked Arnold Guyot, his old friend of Swiss days, come to lecture for him, and to share old times again with him. “Do you remember…” one would begin, and they were off. Eager heads bent toward them, not to lose a word, while great tales unfolded of the days when Louis Agassiz was young. No sound but the rich voice, a little husky now, rumbling on and on, and now and then a quick catch of breath from someone breathless with listening. The island would darken softly until the faces were white blurs, and the cigar point the small light toward which they were all lifted. Glaciers came into existence again on the island, and the night was filled with dreams of climbing them.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 29
